Desiree blogs about issues of interest to elementary educators. Her passion is reading and all skills relevant to being able to read a book. Resources from the page can be found in her storefront on the Teachers Pay Teachers Marketplace.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

I'm trying to find/create some good centres for my kiddies for the month of December. I like these sentence formation activities where students are given a cut up sentence and must put in correct order before recording and leaving the centre.

So I tried my hand at my own. Tell me what you think, please.

Desiree

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If you would like me to review other books for kids please leave a comment. It must be useful to either teachers or parents of children age 4 to grade 2.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

I'm trying to get back into posting regularly, and as a thank you for your patience and continuing to follow me, I'm offering you this forever freebie. I hand drew these face templates for a social studies art activity in my classroom. We were learning about family relationships first term so making a family tree made perfect sense!

Here's the link:

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If you would like me to review other books for kids please leave a comment. It must be useful to either teachers or parents of children age 4 to grade 2.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Every year across Canada, the school day before Remembrance day (some places may have school on the actual day in Ontario I think), students participate in an act of remembrance. At my new school, this is a whole school K-12 assembly in the high school gym. Each class presents a wreath, cross or other item to put on the cenotaph. My class created these super cute coffee filter poppies (inspired by pinterest).

To make I water down some red paint and each student painted two filters. We allowed to dry over night (twice after school I loosed from the paper to ensure they wouldn't tear in the morning).

Once dry each student was handed two random folded filters to cut the corners off to give the illusion of petals.

These were them glued together and a black poppy centre with their name in the middle was applied to the top. These were allowed to dry overnight again to be put on the wreath in the morning.

Friday morning before our assembly with the help of a few students, we glued, crunched, and stapled for extra strength the poppies to the cardboard oval I'd prepared. We added a few leaves to bare spots to fill it out nicely. What do you think?

While we were assembling the wreath, my students coloured and read their ten little poppies Emergent readers. For some of my class it was too easy, but it was an excellent review for those who are still struggling with the lower numbers.

After the assembly we continued our math review with this double sided number match page from my Remembrance day activity sheet pack. My kids did really well counting. They used a variety of strategies to make sure they didn't miscount the poppies. This girl checked them off, another crossed them out, and several circled them. Such great thinking!

EDIT- This resources mentioned in this post have since been MERGED into this LARGE bundle.

This Remembrance Day Bundle is designed to be used as part of your November activities in Canada and the UK for Remembrance Day.

Includes a 3D wreath! (Also useful for Anzac Day, Veterans Day and Memorial Day.)

This contains all the activities of the original, but all have been updated and now include additional activities to differentiate our classrooms according to our individual needs.

The original download was 25 pages, this is now 135 pages and growing!